by John Cheever
“We’ve only been here two weeks,” Hammer said.
“If you want my opinion,” Marietta said, “I’ll be happy to give you one. I think it stinks. It’s just like a masquerade party. All you have to do is to get your clothes at Brooks, catch the train and show up in church once a week and no one will ever ask a question about your identity.”
“Please darling,” Hammer said. “Not tonight.”
“Oh what’s wrong with you,” she asked. “What are you so cross about? You’ve been cross all week. Are you sore because I bought this dress? Is that your trouble? Do you think I ought to buy my clothes at Macy’s or Alexander’s or someplace like that? Do you think I ought to make my own clothes, for Christ’s sake. So it cost four hundred dollars but it looks good on me and I need something to wear. And I don’t have many clothes. Well I don’t have very many clothes. All right I do have a lot of clothes and I’ve said something stupid and now you’re going to gloat over it. Oh Jesus, I wish you could see your face. You make me laugh.”
“You can get nice couturier dresses at Ohrbach’s,” Mrs. Taylor said.
“Not tonight, sweetheart,” Hammer said.
“You’re a doormat,” she went on. “You’re a henpecked doormat and don’t try and blame me for it. You’re the kind of a man who thinks that someday, someday, some slender, well-bred, beautiful, wealthy, passionate and intelligent blonde will fall in love with you. Oh God, I can imagine the whole thing. It’s so disgusting. She’ll have long hair and long legs and be about twenty-eight, divorced, but without any children. I’ll bet she’s an actress or a night-club singer. That’s about the level of your imagination. What do you do with her, chump, what do you do with her besides tying on a can. What is a henpecked doormat up to. Do you take her to the theater? Do you buy her jewelry? Do you travel? I’ll bet you travel. That’s your idea of a big thing. Ten days on the Raffaello, tying on a can morning, noon and night and drifting into the first-class bar at seven in your beautifully cut dinner jacket. What a distinguished couple! What crap. But I guess it would be the France, someplace where you can show off your lousy French. I suppose you’d drag her around Paris in her high heels, showing her all your old haunts. I feel sorry for her, I really do. But get this straight, chump, get this straight. If this blonde showed up you wouldn’t have the guts to take her to bed. You’d just moon around, kissing her behind pantry doors, and finally decide not to be unfaithful to me. That’s if a blonde showed up, but no blonde is going to show up. There isn’t any such blonde. You’re going to be lonely for the rest of your life. You’re a lonely man and a lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stick, a stone, a bone, a doormat, an empty gin bottle …”
“I think we’d better go,” said Mrs. Taylor.
“Yes,” said the Phillipses, and there was a rush for the door.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar, Romeo and Juliet, block and tackle, thunder and lightning, bacon and eggs, corned beef and cabbage, ham and cheese, curb and snaffle, shoes and socks, line and sinker, true and false, sharp and flat, boots and spurs, snorkel and flipper, fish and chips, white tie and tails, bride and groom, dog and cat, sugar and cream, table and chair, pen and ink, stars and moon, ball and chain, tears and laughter, Mummy and Dad, war and peace, heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death, love and death, death and taxes … He slept and dreamed.
He dreamed that they were in a small country church that they sometimes attended in the summer. The church was cruciform and had a threadbare green carpet. There was a sharp and depressing smell of ecclesiastical varnish. The occasion was a funeral and the coffin stood before the chancel but he could not remember whose soul it was they had come to pray for and he looked around the congregation to discover who was missing. Charlie Estabrooke? But he was on the left with his wife. Bailey Barnes? Bailey was on the right with his whole family. Alex Kneeland? Eddie Clapp? Jim Randolph? Sam Farrar? Dave Poor? Rick Rhodes? Jim Stesse? And Roger Cromwell? When he saw that the congregation was intact he realized that the funeral must be his own.
V
When Tony had been in bed for seventeen days there was a spell of fine weather and Nailles woke one morning feeling wonderful. It was about six. The sun had not yet risen but the sky was brilliant. He shaved and bathed and bounded into Nellie’s side of the bed and taking her in his arms he thought she seemed a much younger woman than he knew her to be. They seemed in their loving and being loved to have put down the accumulations of time, as if their baser qualities, like some stern presence, had gone off for an hour or so, leaving them free to sport and revel. When he went to the window the land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew. Septic drain fields lay under the grass and that flock of cardinals in the fir trees might have lice, but while the brilliance of their plumage and the clarity of their singing had nothing to do with peace on earth, love or bank deposits, it gave him such a feeling of exaltation he threw his arms apart as if he were going to embrace the landscape and the birds. “Oh I feel so wonderful,” he said. “Something seems to have happened while I slept. I feel as though I’d been given something, some kind of a present. I feel that everything’s going to be the way it was when it was so wonderful. Tony will get up today or perhaps tomorrow and go back to school. I just know that everything’s going to be wonderful.”
Nailles ate a big breakfast and then went up to Tony’s room. That neither he nor his wife nor his son had ever been ill made the reek of a sickroom, as it flew up to his nose, cutting and strange. The shades were drawn. Tony slept. He slept in his underpants and his shoulders were bare. His skin was a liverish color. His hair was mussed and had not been cut for a month. He embraced his pillow with desperation. “Wake up, Tony,” Nailles said. “Wake up. It’s a marvelous, marvelous morning. Wake up and take a look.” He raised the shades and a brilliant light poured into the sickroom. “Look, Tony, see how bright everything is. Nobody can stay in bed on a day like this. It’s like a challenge, Tony. Everything’s ahead of you. Everything. You’ll go to college and get an interesting job and get married and have children. Everything’s in front of you, Tony. Come to the window.”
He took his son by the hand and drew him out of bed to the window and stood there with an arm around his shoulder. “See, Tony, how bright it all is. Doesn’t it make you feel better?” Tony dropped to his knees on the floor. “Tomorrow, Daddy,” he sobbed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Nailles felt, like some child on a hill, that purpose and order underlay the roofs, trees, river and streets that composed the landscape. There was some obvious purpose in his loving Nellie and the light of morning but what was the purpose, the message, the lesson to be learned from his stricken son? Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made. Tony was sobbing violently and then he spoke—he howled:
“Give me back the mountains.”
“What, Sonny, what did you say?”
“Give me back the mountains.”
“What mountains, Sonny,” Nailles asked. “Do you mean the mountains that we used to climb? The White Mountains. They’re not really white, are they? Remember how we used to climb from Franconia to Crawford? That was fun, wasn’t it? Are those the mountains you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. He got back into bed.
“Well I have to go or I’ll miss the train,” Nailles said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Nailles, waiting that morning for the 7:56, fended off any questions about his son’s health by saying that he had mononucleosis. He stood on the platform between Harry Shinglehouse and Hammer. Nailles and Hammer read the Times. Shinglehouse read the Wall Street Journal. Since the dinner party Nailles and Hammer had said good morning but not much more. They sometimes took the same train in the morning but Nailles had only once seen his neighbor on the 6:32 home, whe
n Hammer was asleep, either drunk or weary or both. He had a black dispatch case in his lap and was humped unconscious over this in a position that seemed desperate and abject. What is the pathos of men and women who fall asleep on trains and planes; why do they seem forsaken, poleaxed and lost? They snore, they twist, they mutter names, they seem the victims of some terrible upheaval although they are merely going home to supper and to cut the grass. Nailles watched his neighbor and when he did not wake up at Bullet Park he shook his shoulder and said: “Time to get up.” “Oh thank you,” said Hammer. It had been their only conversation.
This morning they nodded to one another and read their folded papers as down the tracks came the Chicago express, two hours behind schedule and going about ninety miles an hour. Nailles grabbed for his hat, folded his paper and shut his eyes because the noise and commotion of the express was like being in the vortex of some dirty wind tunnel. When the express had passed he opened his eyes and saw the train helling off into the distance, gaily waving a plume of steam like a pig’s tail. He had started to read the Times again when he noticed that Harry Shinglehouse had vanished. He swung around to see if Harry had changed his position but he was not on the platform. Looking back to the tracks he saw a highly polished brown loafer lying on the cinders. “My God,” he finally said. “That fellow. What’s his name. He was sucked under the train.”
“Hmmmmm,” said Hammer, lowering his paper.
“Shinglehouse. He’s gone.”
“By Jesus, so he has,” said Hammer.
“Shinglehouse,” Nailles shouted. “He’s dead. I mean he was killed.”
“What’ll we do,” said Hammer.
“I’ll call the police,” Nailles said. “I’d better call the police.”
There was a telephone booth at the end of the platform and he ran to this and got the police.
“Patrolman Shea speaking,” said a voice.
“Look,” Nailles said. “This is Eliot Nailles. I’m at the station. The Chicago train just came through and Shinglehouse was sucked under the train.”
“I don’t get it,” said the patrolman. Nailles had to repeat his story three times. The 7:56 came in and everyone but Hammer and Nailles boarded it. A few minutes later they heard the siren and saw the lights of a police car. Two policemen ran out onto the platform. “He was standing right there,” Nailles said. “There’s his loafer. He was standing right there and the train came through and he was gone.”
“Where’s the body?”
“I don’t know,” Nailles said.
“Well I guess you two had better come back to the stationhouse with me for questioning.”
“But we have to go to work,” Hammer said. “I have a meeting.”
“So have I,” Nailles said, “and anyhow we don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you call the railroad police?” This was a shot in the dark but someone had to do something to make that moment continuous and the police seemed grateful for the suggestion. One of them picked the shoe off the tracks and they went back to the patrol car. Suddenly Hammer began to cry. “There,” Nailles said. “There. It’s all right. Was he a friend of yours?”
“No,” Hammer sobbed. “I didn’t know the poor bastard.”
“There, there,” Nailles said, putting an arm around Hammer. They were merely acquaintances but the casualty had thrust them into an intimate relationship. Hammer controlled his sobbing but Nailles kept an arm around his shoulders and this curious couple were seen by the passengers of the 8:11. Nailles and Hammer rode into the city together, stunned by the mysteriousness of life and death.
The evening paper carried the story. The vanished man had been unemployed and had left a wife and three children. He had once run for town council on the Republican ticket and had formerly been in advertising. Nailles wanted to call the widow but he could think of nothing to say.
The next morning was dark and rainy. He overslept and missed the express train that usually took him to his office. The local that he traveled on made twenty-two stops between Bullet Park and Grand Central Station. The dirty train windows and the overcast sky seemed to have eclipsed his spirits. He remembered Shinglehouse’s loafer. He felt peculiar. He read his Times but the news in the paper, with the exception of the sporting page, seemed to be news from another planet. A maniac with a carbine had massacred seventeen people in a park in Dallas, including an archbishop who had been walking his dog. The usual wars were raging. The Musicians’ Union, Airplane Pilots, Firemen, Circus Performers and Deckhands were all threatening to strike. The White House secretary denied rumors of a fistfight between the President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. Drought threatened the wheat crop. An unidentified flying object had been seen in Ohio. A hairdresser in Linden, New Jersey, had shot his wife, his four children, his poodle and himself. A three-day smog in Chicago had paralyzed most transportation and closed many businesses. Nailles felt uncheerful and tried the naïve expedient of bolstering his spirits by assessing his good fortune. Had he been indicted for grand larceny? No. Had he been murdered in a park? No. Had he been trapped in a burning building, lost on a glacier, bitten by a rabid dog? No. Then why wasn’t he more cheerful?
The train stopped at Tremont Point, Greenacres, Lascalles, Meadowvale and Clear Haven. The trip seemed intolerable, but why? He had made it a thousand times. Why should this link between his home and his office seem torturous? His breathing was heavy, his palms were wet, there was a quaking feeling in his gut and the dark rain seemed to beat upon his heart. When the train reached Longbrook, Nailles suddenly grabbed his raincoat, pushed his way past the oncoming passengers and left the car. The train coasted on and he found himself alone in a suburban railway station at half past eight in the morning.
Nailles’s sense of being alive was to bridge or link the disparate environments and rhythms of his world, and one of his principal bridges—that between his white house and his office—had collapsed. He stepped out of the rain into the waiting room. What he needed was guts but where could he find them? He could not summon them, that much was clear. Could he develop them in a gymnasium, win them in a lottery, buy them from a mail-order house or receive them as a heavenly dispensation? There was another local in fifteen minutes and commuters had begun to gather for this. Nailles boarded it, trying to sell himself a specious brand of cheerfulness. He stayed on that local for two more stops and got off again. Station by station he made a cruel pilgrimage into the city.
After dinner that night Nailles poured a strong whiskey and took it up to Tony’s room. He sat in a chair beside Tony’s bed as he had done so many times in the past when he used to read to the boy Treasure Island.
“How do you feel, Sonny?”
“About the same.”
“Did you eat any supper?”
“Yes.”
“There was a long thing in the paper on Sunday about how your generation thinks the world is terribly compromised. Do you think the world is terribly compromised?”
“No, I don’t think it’s compromised.”
“You don’t think this has anything to do with your trouble?”
“I love the world. I just feel sad, that’s all.”
“Well I suppose there’s plenty to be sad about if you look around, but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. I’ve never understood why. When you go to the theater they’re always chopping at the suburbs but I can’t see that playing golf and raising flowers is depraved. The living is cheaper out here and I’d be lost if I couldn’t get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don’t get. For instance, the fact that I wear a vest doesn’t necessarily mean that I claim to be pure in heart. That doesn’t follow. All kinds of scandalous things happen everywhere but just because they happen to people who have flower gardens doesn’t mean that flower gardens are wicked. For instance, Charlie Stringer was indicted last year for sending pornography through the mails. He claims to be some kind of a publisher
and I guess dirty pictures is his business. He lives in one of those Tudor houses on Hansen Circle and he has a pretty wife and three children. Flower gardens. Trees. A couple of poodles. The critics would say: Look, look, look what a big façade he’s constructed to conceal the fact that he deals in obsceneness and corruption, but what’s the point? Why should a man who deals in filth have to live in a cesspool? He’s a bastard for sure but why shouldn’t a bastard want to water his grass and play softball with the kids?
“We talk an awful lot about freedom and independence. If you were going to define our national purpose I don’t guess you could avoid using words like freedom and independence. The President is always talking about freedom and independence, the army and navy are always fighting to defend freedom and independence and on Sundays at church Father Ransome thanks God for our freedom and independence but you and I know that the blacks who live in those firetraps down along the river don’t have any freedom or independence in the choice of what they do and where they live. Charlie Simpson is really a great fellow but he and Phelps Marsden and a half a dozen other prominent and wealthy men around here make their money in deals with Salazar, Franco, Union Minière and all those military juntas. They talk about freedom and independence more than anybody else but they furnish the money and the armaments and the technicians to crush freedom and independence whenever it appears. I hate lying and I hate falsehoods and when you get a world that admits so many liars I suppose you’ve got something to be sad about. I don’t, as a matter of fact, have as much freedom and independence as I’d like myself. What I wear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking is pretty well regimented but there are times when I like being told what to do. I can’t figure out what’s right and wrong in every situation.
“The newspapers are sometimes very confusing. They keep running photographs of soldiers dying in jungles and mudholes right beside an advertisement for a forty-thousand-dollar emerald ring or a sable coat. It would be childish to say that the soldier died for emeralds and sables but there it is, day after day, the dying soldier and the emerald ring. And homosexuality. You read a lot about that these days and it bothers me. I wish it didn’t exist. Before I joined the Chemists Club I used to have to pump ship in Grand Central and I almost never went into those choppers without getting into trouble. Once when I was going up the stairs this guy came along and took my arm. I had on a Brooks suit and a Locke hat and Peal shoes and the reason I had all this stuff on was to make my intentions clear. So I walked away from him. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t see his face. I’ve never seen any of their faces. The only reason I joined the Chemists Club was so that I could have a place in midtown where I could pump ship without getting into a moral crisis. Of course I’m not really a chemist and pushing mouthwash isn’t a very inspiring life but when you think of the things we need you realize that someone has to make them. I mean razor blades and soap and bacon and eggs and gasoline and train tickets and shoes. Somebody has to make all that stuff. Tony? Tony?” Tony slept.
